A majority of likely Democratic voters say the party should nominate someone other than Joe Biden for president next year, according to a poll released on Thursday.
Two-thirds of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters surveyed by CNN and SSRS from 25 to 31 August said they would prefer someone other than Biden. Among those voters, 18% specified another candidate but the overwhelming majority – 82% – said they “just want to see someone besides” the current president.
Among declared Democratic candidates, however, Biden is seen as the best-positioned to beat the clear Republican favorite, Donald Trump, CNN said. Other contenders include Robert F Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, and the self-help author Marianne Williamson, who also ran in 2020.
Most observers say the US economy is strong, and note legislative successes for Biden, including the passage of ambitious infrastructure and domestic spending packages. In last year’s midterms, messaging about Republican extremism, particularly on abortion and voting rights, helped Democrats avoid the kind of heavy losses usually suffered by a president’s party.
Polling now shows voters are split on partisan lines when it comes to the merits or otherwise of a likely impeachment effort driven by far-right House Republicans over business deals involving the president’s son, Hunter Biden.
But Biden’s own poll numbers remain stubbornly low. In the new poll from CNN and SSRS, the president’s approval rating was just 39%. Nearly 60% of respondents said they thought Biden’s policies had made economic conditions worse, while 76% said they were seriously concerned that, at 80, the president was too old to serve a full term if re-elected.
That echoed other recent polls, including a survey conducted during roughly the same period and released on Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal. In that poll, 73% of voters said Biden was “too old to run for president” but just 47% of voters said the same about Trump, who is only three years younger than Biden.
Despite widespread opposition to a second term for Biden, the CNN poll found that Nikki Haley was the only possible Republican nominee who voters said would conclusively beat Biden next year.
Haley, 51 and a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, enjoyed a clear lead over Biden in a notional general election, by 49% to 43%. On the campaign trail, Haley has repeatedly targeted Biden’s age, calling for mental competency tests for politicians over 75.
Haley is, however, generally fourth in Republican polling averages, behind the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. All of them are way behind Trump, who has long dominated the race regardless of an extreme legal predicament that now features 91 criminal charges and civil suits including a defamation case in which he has been adjudicated a rapist.
On Wednesday, in the strongest challenge yet to Trump’s eligibility to participate in the election, a watchdog group sued to remove him from the 2024 ballot in Colorado. The suit argues that Trump’s involvement in the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 – when supporters he told to “fight like hell” sought to block certification of Biden’s election win – disqualifies the former president because the US constitution bars from office any state or federal official who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion”.
Trump did not take part in the first Republican debate in Wisconsin last month, a contest Haley was widely held to have won. But she has not seen a meaningful bump in support among Republican voters.
Jim Messina, a former campaign chair for Barack Obama, to whom Biden was vice-president, this week called Democrats worried about Biden’s prospects “fucking bedwetters” and said electoral signs remained positive.
But according to the CNN poll, match-ups between Biden and all other major Republican candidates returned ties or scores within the margin of error.
Trump is set to face a series of criminal and civil trials in election year. Nonetheless, he led Biden by 47% to 46%. DeSantis and Biden were tied on 47%. Biden was one point ahead of Ramaswamy, 47% to 46%. The former vice-president Mike Pence, the South Carolina senator Tim Scott and the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a rare Trump critic, edged Biden out by two points each.

theguardian